How to implement a circular buffer in C

ccircular-bufferdata structures

I have a need for a fixed-size (selectable at run-time when creating it, not compile-time) circular buffer which can hold objects of any type and it needs to be very high performance. I don't think there will be resource contention issues since, although it's in a multi-tasking embedded environment, it's a co-operative one so the tasks themselves can manage that.

My initial thought was to store a simple struct in the buffer which would contain the type (simple enum/define) and a void pointer to the payload but I want this to be as fast as possible so I'm open to suggestions that involve bypassing the heap.

Actually I'm happy to bypass any of the standard library for raw speed – from what I've seen of the code, it's not heavily optimized for the CPU : it looks like they just compiled C code for things like strcpy() and such, there's no hand-coded assembly.

Any code or ideas would be greatly appreciated. The operations required are:

  • create a buffer with specific size.
  • put at the tail.
  • get from the head.
  • return the count.
  • delete a buffer.

Best Answer

The simplest solution would be to keep track of the item size and the number of items, and then create a buffer of the appropriate number of bytes:

typedef struct circular_buffer
{
    void *buffer;     // data buffer
    void *buffer_end; // end of data buffer
    size_t capacity;  // maximum number of items in the buffer
    size_t count;     // number of items in the buffer
    size_t sz;        // size of each item in the buffer
    void *head;       // pointer to head
    void *tail;       // pointer to tail
} circular_buffer;

void cb_init(circular_buffer *cb, size_t capacity, size_t sz)
{
    cb->buffer = malloc(capacity * sz);
    if(cb->buffer == NULL)
        // handle error
    cb->buffer_end = (char *)cb->buffer + capacity * sz;
    cb->capacity = capacity;
    cb->count = 0;
    cb->sz = sz;
    cb->head = cb->buffer;
    cb->tail = cb->buffer;
}

void cb_free(circular_buffer *cb)
{
    free(cb->buffer);
    // clear out other fields too, just to be safe
}

void cb_push_back(circular_buffer *cb, const void *item)
{
    if(cb->count == cb->capacity){
        // handle error
    }
    memcpy(cb->head, item, cb->sz);
    cb->head = (char*)cb->head + cb->sz;
    if(cb->head == cb->buffer_end)
        cb->head = cb->buffer;
    cb->count++;
}

void cb_pop_front(circular_buffer *cb, void *item)
{
    if(cb->count == 0){
        // handle error
    }
    memcpy(item, cb->tail, cb->sz);
    cb->tail = (char*)cb->tail + cb->sz;
    if(cb->tail == cb->buffer_end)
        cb->tail = cb->buffer;
    cb->count--;
}
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